Review: Night Wing

Warning: This review is unfinished and will remained as it is.
I lose my motivation before finishing this review and left it in my private note for months only to decide to published it anyway.

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Spoiler warning: up to chapter Fiery Cycle

https://www.fimfiction.net/story/402462/night-wing
Another fanfic, another story that left me with conflicted feeling.
This is a story about a guy reincarnated as black phoenix-thing and help the royal sisters and starswirl build Equestria from the ground up.
There are many questionable choices that was made early on that will not brough up again, like ponies mature as fast as real-life horse for example.

But still, overall, it was good. So many interesting concepts that keep me going. The way the protagonist communicates, the griffin's society, and how the changelings were integrated into Equestria and used as part of main plot.
For me, the main selling of this fanfic is the solid world-building. A world that wasn't too serious with itself but still not outright ridiculous cartoonist. It keeps pulling me in repeatedly when I am started to losing interest.
that, and decent drama here and there, make this fanfic a page turner.

It good enough to suppress the negative points.... until it wasn't. The negatives outgrown it.

More than anything else, seeing a decent story with great potential gone slowly devolving into something left me with worse feeling than reading a bad story.
It had many chances to corrected itself. Many potential routes to went on, but alas, it all gone to waste.

Characters are unlikable. And unlikable did not mean they weren't a good person. The joker was a psychopath serial killer, and he was likable. Unlikable mean characters are not attractive enough to make a reader wanted to know more about them.
They worked as a part of drama, a piece of grand show, but no way they could be the focus with expectation of reader to like them.

We always like to watch conflict unfold. Plot of most Movies, Books, and Video games are about watching the conflict unfold or solving the conflict.
Drama was a form of conflict.
As such, unlikable characters can be used as part of a relationship conflict, a drama. Our to conflict-seeking brain liked it so much that it would ignore how unlikable characters were if the drama itself was good, and most drama would work.

The keyword is "most".

Romance-oriented drama and mellow drama required likeable character to work.

Imagine, main characters being written with personality of side characters, and having romance story arc or mellow drama with fellow side characters.

For this fanfic, it didn't matter if what that character is doing, It didn't matter if it was good or bad. The way it was being portrayed, their inner thought and their minor actions made it felt like they are throwaway characters.

There is other form of drama that did not required likeable characters that this fanfic could use. Resource management and foreign relationship could be explored more.

And less focus on the protagonist.

The protagonist was a mess. He did not have a fixed personality. He can be whatever the plot wants without a proper character development to show why he change. Was he secretly a bipolar?

And that also apply to other characters in lesser extend as they did not share as much screen time as the protagonist, but the most jarring one is how Luna fall.

Its main strength, the worldbuilding, was skimp over as quickly in fast pace, and mellow drama or action scene of protagonist took main stage.

Hey, can we go back to changeling hive tesla coil and the remnant of queenless changeling hive pretty please? No? What is about rebel in griffin kingdom and aftermath of the dead of its king? No.....okay.

granted, it was kind of from the first chapter, but it got more and more jarring as it progresses on, until it cannot be ignore.

And another thing, it seems like this story is hesitant to fully diverge from the cannon timeline.

I do not know why. This story is a full creative work that did not relies much on the main story anyway. It was set in a thousand years prior to the main event. Everything is pretty much made up by the author and it was quite good.

Then why I felt like it was setup in a way for the event in cannon to happen.

even when it explicitly shown that the protagonist freezes the tree of harmony so the divergent from original timeline could happen.

And why freeze? Why not destroy it? The protagonist killed people for far less crime and yet he lets the tree alive, frozen for.... exactly thousand years. Just enough time to return and greet the mane6 in the future...

Yeah,

Comments

[France ball2]

He locked Harmony away for a thousand years because she said it's only a thousand years when referring to Luna/Nightmare Moon.